Texas, Dobbs, And The GOP's Refusal To Moderate
Republicans Aren't Moving Back
"We've literally seen one centre right party in any English speaking democracy pull the car around in the suburbs this entire decade. It took someone who was pro-action on climate, pro-gay marriage, and anti-culture war nonsense to pull it off. We saw what happened when he came in, and then when he left, and it is very clear that he was the reason they did so well amongst educated, well off social liberals. Without him, those gains were gone. What in the world makes people think the GOP can pull it off when they're explicitly trying not to?"
I wrote that for Political Salad in January, in a broader piece about the problems with the idea the GOP will get the vaunted suburban reversion in 2022 that they need if they are to win back the House (or, at least, win more than 225 seats), and ever since then I've been looking at that piece with some pride. That last sentence sticks with me a lot, because the GOP are not trying to win back well-off white social liberals, and yet the pundit class accrues them the benefits of a strategy they are explicitly not pursuing. And it fucking infuriates me.
This week, the fight for women's safe and legal access to abortion took two hits - first, from a Supreme Court decision to hear Dobbs, a case which seeks to overturn the Court's past findings in both Roe and Casey, and secondly, the passing of Texas' functional abortion ban, which seeks to limit abortions to only the period before a fetal heartbeat, which can be as soon as six weeks (and at a point when it is frequently unclear whether someone is pregnant). The Texas law is particularly odious, with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest, but what makes me more mad is the near certainty that the law will not prevent abortions, just make access extremely unequal based on how much money you have and the zipcode you live in.
I'm angry because I know, in my bones, that the college students who come from money and end up with a pregnancy they don't want as a consequence of a night of (consensual) bad decisions will manage to find their way out of that situation with nothing more than a financial penalty they can easily afford, and that the well-off professionals who end up pregnant before they want to be will find a way around the law. What I also know is that access for those without money and means will be severely limited, and that's why the GOP are doing this. They don't care about life, because Greg Abbott allowed the state of Texas to kill a man on the same day he talked about saving lives. The hypocrisy knows no bounds, because the point isn't to stop abortions, but to punish the poor, those who aren't white, and those who aren't going to be showing up at charity dinners in Fort Worth any time soon.
The effect of this Texas law - which I'm sure will be extensively litigated in court before it comes into effect in September - and of the probable outcome in Dobbs will be to make the lives of Americans worse, by taking away medical care decisions from people who should be making them and giving them to legislatures and courts full of old white men. It's a moral tragedy and a legal farce, and while SCOTUS taking Dobbs does not guarantee they will take apart the precedents of Roe and Casey, you can easily ask why SCOTUS would take a case when they didn't need to just to slap it down. Spoiler alert: they usually don't.
What this week's attacks have shown is that the GOP are seeking to govern America - both from the states they still control, and through the legacy of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett - for the social conservative minority of Americans. 40% of America, per the Fox Exits in 2020, believed abortion should be illegal in most or all cases, and that 40% may be on the verge of getting their way. To be clear, that is an abomination that we should all oppose, and once Democrats have the ability to do so, they should enshrine all the rights of Roe in federal law, and this underlines why Stephen Breyer must step down from the Court this summer.
The mistake that Ruth Bader Ginsburg made - basically gambling that Hillary would win, and she could be replaced then - cannot be allowed to happen here. For whatever my bullishness on Democratic chances to hold the Senate in 2022, letting the future of another Supreme Court seat stay in the air, at the whim of the electorate, cannot be allowed to happen. Breyer may want to stay on for himself, but his responsibility dictates that he must go, for the good of the movement he has given much of his life to advancing from the bench.
Beyond all my anger at the GOP's policies, which will hurt so many, I'm just thinking about those words I wrote in January. Why are we assuming the GOP will accrue the benefits of moderation when they have no interest in acting on it? Greg Abbott may crow about his abortion ban, but I highly, highly doubt no abortions past six weeks will play well in Southlake or suburban Austin, both of which are sprinting left. In a state where a majority of voters think abortion should be legal in most or all cases (55% support for those two options, per the 2020 Fox exits), this is a problem for the GOP.
In 2016, Donald Trump won Hays County, the county directly due south of Austin, by a point. In 2020, he lost it by 11%. Williamson, the county right above Austin, went for Trump in 2016 by 9.6%, before Biden won it by 1.4% last year. None of these places will be happy with this bill, and the Texas GOP are giving the voters already considering an exit from the GOP - well-off white social liberals - a push to the exit. If and when SCOTUS decides in Dobbs, the same push will be given nationally. The GOP path to a good midterm is by continuing to win over cultural conservatives, as they do by overwhelmingly winning voters who believe that abortion should be mostly or wholly illegal, while managing to get back social liberals who disagree with the party on abortion but like the GOP's offered tax cuts. How they manage to stem the tide of social liberals when the only two substantive things GOP states are doing these days are trying to make voting harder and limit access to abortion is beyond me. Oh wait, I lied, they're also targeting trans people with a dehumanizing campaign of vitriol and restrictions on their humanity and health.
The GOP are going all in on a maddeningly horrific cultural conservative vision of America, and the consequences of it will be damaging for years, and even decades, to come. I still bear the scars of realizing I was gay during the great fight over Prop 8, which started 13 years ago. The GOP are trying to build back the America where abortion was a thing that nobody discussed and everyone felt uncomfortable about, but the rich could still manage to secure when needed, where a gay son was a great badge of shame for parents and where gay couples lived their whole lives in fear, and one where trans people existed in the shadows, never rising to any prominence or place. They want a world where everything is as it used to be, because for those straight, white cultural conservatives, things were easier then. Things made sense to them then, and now they don't.
The GOP are trying to build a world where people like me feel fear being with a partner of mine in public, where doctors control health outcomes for women and trans people, and where the core tenant of American conservatism - the notion of individual liberty - does not matter when it comes to the state's interest in imposing their morals. The GOP are trying to return America to the country it used to be before Lawrence v Texas, when - in my lifetime - two men engaging in a consensual sexual act, within the confines of one's home constituted a crime. The GOP, fundamentally, are trying to recreate a country that knows gay people and trans people and Black people exist, but pushes them to the edges of society and the brink of despair. To pretend otherwise is to live in denial.
The GOP have made their choice, clearly and vocally and repeatedly, nationally and at a state level. They have no interest in a Malcolm Turnbull-esque about turn, a pivot to a politics of compassionate conservatism, an acceptance of a new America. They have made that abundantly clear, and now it is on all of us to be abundantly clear about what that means. We know that the GOP will continue to bleed with well-off white social liberals because every single time the global right runs in an election with a platform and an emphasis on their cultural conservatism, the right loses ground in places filled with well-off white social liberals, as the UK Tories did not two weeks ago in the south of England. The GOP are explicitly choosing to continue on the path that has led to them bleeding support in Southlake and Forsyth and the Milwaukee collar, and we should be as explicit that they will continue to bleed support in these areas because of it.